9

The Lady’s Slipper

‘Though I know well enough

To hunt the Lady’s Slipper now

Is playing blindman’s-buff,

For it was June She put it on

And grey with mist the spider’s lace

Swings in the autumn wind,

Yet through this hill-wood, high and low,

I peer in every place;

Seeking for what I cannot find

I do as I have often done

And shall do while I stay beneath the sun.’

Andrew Young, Selected Poems (1998)

Lancashire and Yorkshire
June 2013

Yorkshire, June 1930. Deep in the heart of an ancient oak wood, clothed in the fresh green of early summer, two brothers climbed steadily over knotted roots and crumbling scree. They walked in quiet tandem, ducking beneath branches that hung low with mosses and ferns. A long, arduous week weaving cotton in the factory had left them restless and tired. Because of this, they had almost stayed at home.

As they walked, bright shafts of light broke through in places, casting pools upon the woodland floor. The roar of the river, distant and monotonous, gave them their bearings. At the crest of a slope, the elder brother came to an abrupt halt. He pointed at a single flower growing on a grassy bank. Without meaning to, they had found Britain’s Holy Grail: the Lady’s Slipper Orchid was alive and well.

If ever the plant kingdom had a celebrity, it would be the Lady’s Slipper. No other orchid has attracted so much attention and been subject to such levels of protection. Declared extinct in Britain in 1917, it was famously rediscovered in 1930 by the Jarman brothers, both cotton weavers from Silsden. This single plant remains the only one in the wild. Its stunning flowers are a feast for the senses: spirals of claret and bubbles of yellow. It is unlike anything else found in Britain. Almost mythical, it has become a household name among naturalists.

In 1629, John Parkinson, a London apothecary, found one ‘in a wood called the Helkes in Lancashire neere the border of Yorkeshire’. It was the first time the Lady’s Slipper, or Cypripedium calceolus, was recorded in Britain. Over the following century, it was discovered across the north of England, growing in limestone pockets from Derbyshire to Cumbria, and Lancashire to Northumberland. If you wanted to see this plant in the 1800s, your best bet would have been to head to the Yorkshire Dales or Castle Eden Dene in County Durham.

Old records show that the Slipper was never a common plant in Britain, only rarely appearing in large numbers. William Curtis found it growing ‘in considerable plenty in the neighbourhood of Kilnsey’ near Grassington in the late 1700s, but there are few other records of large colonies.

An orchid of great beauty, with such large, conspicuous blooms, quickly caught people’s attention; it was picked and dug up from the moment it was first recorded. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Victorian Orchidelirium was on the rise and the woods and hillsides were stripped of their Slippers at an alarming rate. They were transplanted to gardens, sold from market stalls in Skipton and Settle, and dried and pressed for personal herbaria. Today, there are more than 700 herbarium sheets of British Cypripedium specimens held in universities and institutions across the country. In 1976, Summerhayes lamented its decline in Wild Orchids of Britain: it could no longer be found growing at Parkinson’s original location in Helks Wood, ‘having been eradicated by a gardener at Ingleton who apparently had a ready sale for it’. By the mid-1800s, the Lady’s Slipper was rare and in 1917 it was officially declared lost from Britain.

The Lady’s Slipper fell into legend. Naturalists spoke of it in hushed tones, craving its mystical reappearance: would it ever be discovered again? Who would find it? And where? It became a plant of pilgrimage, an orchid that needed to be searched for and brought back to life. But Orchidelirium had driven the Lady’s Slipper to extinction; or so people thought.

On 6th June 1930, quite by chance, a single specimen was discovered by the Jarman brothers on a remote hillside in Yorkshire, clinging precariously to existence. After much deliberation, they decided to share their find with a few trusted individuals, the identities of whom remain unknown. Upon realising that the Jarmans were telling the truth, the group retired to a local pub in the valley where they agreed to tell no one of its existence: they would protect it at all costs.

For decades, it was kept a closely guarded secret, known only to this small group of naturalists. The plant flowered sporadically, producing fewer stems, hoping one day to be pollinated by another plant. For nearly four decades, Willie Jarman and his son Bob kept detailed notes on the progress of the plant, taking measurements and counting flowers.

Many big-name botanists were excluded. Ted Lousley, for example, writes in Wild Flowers of Chalk and Limestone that the Slipper is ‘one of the rarest and most elusive of British plants and one of the few I have not seen in the wild myself’. But a plant like this couldn’t be kept quiet for ever.

In his book about the Yorkshire Dales, John Lee recalls an article by T. Hey published in The Dalesman entitled ‘The Lost Slipper of the Dales’. Just after the end of the Second World War, Hey informs his readers that ‘there have been occasional reports in more recent years that the Lady’s Slipper still survives in these hills. Whether by some miracle an odd plant still remains it is impossible to say, for the botanists who may know wisely keep silent’. He goes on to recount an evening visit from Willie Jarman to discuss the local fox populations, but quickly realises that there’s more on the agenda: ‘I soon discovered that he had brought far more interesting news than that – he had chapter and verse for the existence of Cypripedium calceolus in the Dales. I will not disclose the spot, but he left me with notes of the history of those few plants over three years – how many had flowered, how cattle had nibbled back two of them, and how he was certain they still survived.’

In the 1960s, an article entitled ‘Hunting the Lady’s Slipper Orchid’ appeared in The Times, detailing its discovery, though its source remained a mystery. In the following years, when the plant flowered, one member of the society removed the flower buds so that it would remain inconspicuous. Unsurprisingly, this proved unpopular with the rest of the society: any chance of the plant being pollinated and producing seeds had been squandered. One disgruntled member leaked the rough location of the orchid to the press. Mere days later, a hole appeared in the ground where the orchid had been. It had been stolen. Or at least that was their first thought. Purely by chance, the thief had departed with only part of the rhizome – an underground stem – while the rest remained present and intact.

The president of the BSBI, Edgar Milne-Redhead, called a meeting in the Dales in 1969 with representatives from the Nature Conservancy, the BSBI, the Yorkshire Naturalists’ Union and the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust to discuss the conservation of Cypripedium and its habitat, as it was clear that protecting the remaining plant wasn’t going to be a solution in the long term. They decided to pollinate the plant artificially, transferring pollen to the stigma using a pencil or paintbrush, but they would need to find plants of known British origin growing in gardens in order to cross-pollinate the wild one. The group met annually and became known as the Cypripedium Committee. Today, it has approximately ten members drawn from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, Natural England, the BSBI, the National Trust and the Alpine Garden Society.

Much earlier, in the 1950s, a friend of the Jarmans, who I will call Robert, had happened across a local plant nursery that was shutting down. In this nursery was a small bed with about twenty plant pots set in rows. It was early in the year and the pots appeared empty, so he casually asked the elderly owner what they were. The reply made him splutter: wild Lady’s Slipper Orchids dug up from all over north Yorkshire. The collection had dwindled over the years, and these twenty pots were all that were left. Incredulous, Robert bought the lot and took them home. Over the years, he kept them growing in their pots, ultimately persuading some of them to flower. With the orchid’s survival at heart, he eventually offered Kew some of his plants.

John Lovis, then a member of the Botany department at Leeds University, undertook the first attempt at pollinating the Lady’s Slipper and in the first year, two flowers were produced. On returning to the site a couple of days after his first visit, however, he found that someone had snipped off both shoots. This was the final straw: the Cypripedium Committee weren’t willing to risk the plant disappearing again.

To this day, every summer, from the moment the Lady’s Slipper pushes its way up through the soil until the last of its seeds have been dispersed, the plant is under round-the-clock surveillance at a secret location. A warden lives in a small hut nearby and monitors the trip wires that surround the caged flowers. There are rumours he carries a shotgun. This level of protection is unprecedented for a plant, here or anywhere in the world. When inquisitive orchid lovers come asking questions, they are all turned away by the warden. The most desperate have been known to propose bribes: money, whisky and Wimbledon tickets.

No one is allowed near the plant. Even the members of the Cypripedium Committee limit themselves to a visit once every ten years. This isn’t only to avoid attracting criminals: by getting close to the plant you disturb its habitat and begin compacting the soil, decreasing the chances of natural propagation occurring.

Other efforts have been made, besides protection, to save the flower. In the 1980s, scientists at Kew developed a skill that had been beyond the Victorian plant collectors: how to grow the Lady’s Slipper from seed.

It took years of trial and error. A cultivated plant of British origin, affectionately known as the Hornby, was used to hand-pollinate the last remaining Lady’s Slipper in the wild and is also now used to pollinate those being grown at Kew Gardens. Scientists at Kew, with help from a Swedish orchid enthusiast, developed a way to germinate the seeds without help from the Slipper’s symbiotic fungal partner. It turned out that the Slipper was partial to pineapple juice. They found that seeds could be induced to germinate on an agar medium containing a very specific combination of vitamins and amino acids, watered down with some of Tropicana’s finest.

Propagating orchids is notoriously difficult. And reintroducing the Lady’s Slipper to our countryside from such a small sample of plants was always going to be particularly challenging. Today, the Cypripedium Committee, Natural England and Kew Gardens are working tirelessly on the reintroduction programme. In the first year, they prepared seventy-one seedlings to plant back out into the British countryside. Unfortunately, most of these either didn’t survive or were found to contain genes from plants in continental Europe. The project was trying at all costs to preserve the indigenous British gene pool.

The Lady’s Slipper is a long-lived species. The wild plant in the Yorkshire Dales is thought to be at least one hundred years old. A few have lived to almost two hundred. During development, everything must fall into place perfectly. Most importantly, the plant must establish a relationship with a specific fungus, to support it for the first few years of its life. It’s not until the fourth year of the orchid’s life that a green leaf emerges from the soil, which means that for the first three years of the plant’s life, it is entirely dependent on the fungus. Only after a decade does the first flower appear.

To date, the reintroduction programme has been incredibly successful. The Cypripedium Committee drew up a list of suitable reintroduction sites: many were the orchid’s former haunts across the north of England, while a few were new locations deemed to be appropriate to host this special plant. When the orchids were considered strong enough, they were planted out in secret and carefully monitored. In 2003, twelve sites had been established. In 2004, the first wild flowering occurred, at Gait Barrows Nature Reserve in Lancashire, and in 2008 the first naturally pollinated flower to produce a seed pod was observed.

Despite all the setbacks, the Lady’s Slipper has clung to existence in Britain. Today, several of the reintroduction sites are open to the public so that every June, people can see this yellow-and-burgundy orchid flowering in the wild once again. Every flower that bursts into bloom is an enormous credit to the endeavours of the Cypripedium Committee, Natural England, the scientists at Kew, cooperative land-owners and a long line of amateur naturalists who live and breathe orchid conservation.

High up on the hill, I watched as ravens floated by on thermals rising from the valley. Their croaks were barely audible over a cacophony of bleating lambs. Down below lay a tiny slumbering village; a string of greying houses marking a valley known to be a Slipper hotspot prior to the Victorian era. This seemed a good place to search.

There was something romantic about searching for the Lady’s Slipper, hidden in the intimate rolling hills of the Dales, between quaint villages and tumbledown hamlets. Even today, very few people know the exact location of the last wild plant. So, unlike other rarities, it wouldn’t be surrounded by white tape or people with cameras; and the surrounding vegetation would be lush and healthy, rather than trampled flat by botanists’ boots. The Lady’s Slipper lives a peaceful life, existing but not showboating, its flamboyant yellow flowers blooming in stark contrast to its humble, solitary nature.

I climbed further into the hills above the woods which covered the steep slope down into the valley. The upland grassland was awash with yellow buttercups and crosswort. Pignut bloomed white and lacey; sedges lined the paths with clusters of chocolatey-lime flowers, and wild thyme was beginning to add splashes of pink to the anthills.

The further I climbed, the more interesting the flora became. Unusual species began appearing out of nowhere. As a botanist, I find the allure of plants is not just about the individuals, but the community as a whole and how it comes together to form a habitat. Here on the hillside, I had an exciting assemblage of species. There were purple and yellow mountain pansies scattered about in small groups, and the tiny star-like flowers of knotted pearlwort. Above me, on a steep bank where a spring had burst from the rock, were bubblegum-pink bird’s-eye primroses. Early Purple Orchids, still in prime condition, were sprinkled here and there. Grizzled, age-old limestone broke free of the earth in places, with shallow grykes that housed shuttlecocks of male fern and hart’s-tongue: shelter for the rock-hopping meadow pipits. I walked down towards the wood, listening to the eerie cries of the curlews on the moor.

Two days earlier, I had seen my first Lady’s Slipper. I’d visited Gait Barrows Nature Reserve on the Lancashire–Cumbria border, where the first reintroduced plant had flowered in 2004. I’d arrived in the late afternoon, exhausted after a long, gruelling drive up the M6. For the final twenty minutes of my journey, I had been near-paralysed with fear as strange whining noises emanated from the engine of my car. But upon reaching the reserve, my worries vanished when I caught sight of a large photo of a Lady’s Slipper tacked onto the gate. Below was emblazoned the message: ‘follow the way markers to the viewing site’.

Gait Barrows is a wonderful mix of woodland and limestone pavement. As I walked to the viewing site, the early-evening sunshine was streaming through the surrounding vegetation. Glorious blackbird song flowed from the top of a birch tree. It had rained earlier in the day; the fresh smell of wet rock was heavy on the air.

I could see the limestone pavement through gaps in the trees, the same pale silver I’d enjoyed so much in Ireland. The pavements were different, though, lacking the wide, sweeping views of the Burren. Instead, you were never far from woodland. This created hidden pockets of pewter and green. The grykes were spilling over with bedstraws, speedwells and blue-green juniper. One was full of hart’s-tongue fern, whose undersides were striped with sori: orange bars bulging from smooth fronds like the rungs of a ladder.

The path broadened, opening onto a wide clearing with small yew trees clustered in groups. Tufts of grass had fought their way through the limestone, giving the area an air of abandonment. A white tape was strung up in one corner, and below it was one of the most stunning orchids I’d ever seen.

It’s difficult to describe the emotional impact. Over the years, I’ve read a lot about orchids and ogled hundreds of photos of their unmistakeable flowers, but nothing could have prepared me for that first glimpse of the fragile, jaw-dropping beauty of the Lady’s Slipper.

A whole row of banana-yellow petals, unthinkably delicate, ballooned into shoes, slippers and clogs in front of me. Each one was hollow and smelled faintly citrusy. The base of the petal, closest to the centre of the flower, was shaped into a creamy tongue-like chute and speckled with small red flecks. Surrounding this absurd petal, in flawless complement, were four claret sepals that corkscrewed outward in a perfect compass.

I needed a moment to drink them in. I sat down next to a group of three plants whose flowers were lit up like Chinese lanterns in the evening sunshine. The warm light turned the slippers a golden yellow. The orchid closest to me had flowers with a wide sepal which fluttered in the wind like a main sail.

A few feet away was another cluster of Slippers hiding in the lee of a large limestone boulder, their flowers a burst of colour against the silvery-grey background. The day’s rain was still evident: juicy droplets of water clung to the hollow petals as if frozen in place. I peered inside to see small pools collecting within. Not a good day for a swim if you were a bee.

These orchids are most frequently pollinated by small solitary bees of the genus Andrena. Attracted by the flower’s scent, the bee lands on the lip and enters the slipper. After a minute or so looking around for nectar, it attempts to leave the way it came in, but finds the edges too smooth and slippery so is unable to escape. The only way out is via the two tunnels on either side, which are helpfully lined with stiff hairs for footholds. As the bee exits through the tunnel, it’s forced to brush against one of the stamens, picking up pollen grains in the process. An elegant pollination mechanism for an elegant flower.

The graceful blooms have been inspiring folklore for centuries. According to one story, the ‘Lady’ was the Virgin Mary herself, and the red speckles inside the slipper are from the blood that spattered on her feet as she kept vigil beneath the cross. According to Medieval belief, the Virgin Mary would be protected by things of the plant world in her greatest hours of need. Hence her clothes were all made of flowers: hat, corset and shoelaces.

Another myth attributes the flower to the goddess Venus. Legend has it that while out hunting, Venus and Adonis got caught in a storm. Sheltering in a secluded spot, hidden behind bushes and undergrowth, they indulged in passionate love. A passer-by noticed Venus’s golden shoe on the path, and when he reached down to pick it up, it was transformed into a slipper-shaped flower.

The name Cypripedium was coined by Linnaeus and derived from Cyprus, the supposed birthplace of Venus. The Latin epithet calceolus simply translates as ‘little shoe’ or ‘little slipper’. All around me, delicate yellow moccasins bloomed in memorial of Venus. This quiet corner of Gait Barrows was her shoe closet.

Time seemed to stand still. Miraculously, I was alone; free to wander between orchids and marvel at each one. Their beauty overwhelmed me. I silently thanked the Cypripedium Committee for their remarkably successful efforts, and felt immensely privileged to be standing among Lady’s Slippers growing in the wild. Ten years previously this simply wouldn’t have been possible.

Buoyed by this sighting, I resolved to search for the one wild plant in the Yorkshire Dales. It might be futile, but I had to try.

Despite my best efforts, I had failed to learn the exact location of the last truly wild Lady’s Slipper. Very few know where it grows, and those who do keep quiet. I had experienced the tight-lipped nature of its faithful guardians first hand. It is amazing, and slightly ridiculous, how well this secret has lasted the test of time. The Yorkshire Dales cover an enormous area and, while Summerhayes assured me that the Lady’s Slipper once grew in these valleys, I had no idea where it still survived. Over the previous few days, I’d searched in woodlands and valleys across the Dales, but to no avail. It seemed the Slipper would elude me.

Tucking my thumbs into my rucksack, I gazed one last time down into the valley in this peaceful corner of the Dales, before plunging into the woodland. I squeezed through tiny gaps in the dry-stone wall, admiring water avens and listening to the willow warblers echoing around the canopy. Sun filtered down through oak and hazel. This was a wild wood. I quickly lost the footpath and found myself carving through a jungle of plants: solomon’s-seal bloomed in shady fronds; bright-pink petals of herb-robert sprung from behind thick, swollen tree trunks; and pale snowballs of sanicle were dotted among the white enchanter’s-nightshade.

Somewhere out there, hidden within the secluded folds of the Dales, the Lady’s Slipper was waiting.

The wood was sombre and old. You could feel it in the gnarled crevasses of the bark and hear it in the birdsong muffled by moss and thick undergrowth. The rest of the world seemed so far away. This is what England must have been like thousands of years ago: a wonderful, unadulterated wilderness. I’d given up on finding the Lady’s Slipper. Perhaps it was better if it remained undiscovered.

I was clambering along the hill, completely and utterly disorientated by the wood, with no idea which way I needed to go to get back to the car. After some time, twisting through the trees along the hillside, I still hadn’t reached a footpath. I was very lost.

Eventually I reached an angled fence with a small makeshift gate. A battered wooden sign with the words ‘NO ENTRY’ daubed in red was slung over the barbed wire. I was struck by how out of place this was. I was convinced by now that the nearest public footpath must be miles away. It made no sense for a local landowner to have a gate here.

Leaning on the metal gate, I peered through the trees on the other side of the fence. The hazels and oaks were knotted and scarred, great stalwarts of the forest. Moss clothed the branches in furry green. Even at this stage, I never really thought I’d stumbled upon anything special, but after a couple of minutes of peeping and squinting, I did a double take: there, between the trees, was a small cabin painted dark myrtle-green, as camouflaged as a chameleon.

Heart beating faster now, I craned my neck, pacing up and down the fence. Could it be the wild site? Could I have just stumbled across a location so secret I’d found it impossible to track down through my network of sources? Keeping an eye on the cabin, I slithered carefully down through the ferns. Suddenly, I saw it: a flash of gold between two hazels.

It was the Lady’s Slipper.

My stomach lurched. It was like nothing I had ever experienced. This was the very same plant found by the Jarmans in 1930, growing all on its own in the middle of this quiet wood. So many people had tried and failed to find this plant. I could only just see it, eleven bubbles of yellow visible between the trees in the distance. And there were the tiny corkscrews of maroon. The last Lady’s Slipper. Inexplicably, I’d found its quiet sanctuary.

As I stood there, gawking at this impeccable plant, a movement beyond it caught my eye. A man was coming down the hill on the other side of the fence, walking slowly but purposefully towards me, zigzagging between trees: the warden. As he approached, every argument that I’d quickly prepared floated gently away, leaving my mind blank and my heart racing.

‘’Ello,’ he said in a thick Yorkshire accent, ‘ah yer lost?’ He seemed friendly enough and, I noted with relief, didn’t appear to be carrying a shotgun. I stuttered, unsure what to tell him, so I gestured in the direction of the plant and mumbled something about orchids.

A smile spread across his face. ‘Well now, well done for getting this far. Not many do.’ My heart doubled in pace; was he going to let me see it up close? He was clearly under the impression that I’d known where the site was all along; understandably too, given how unlikely it was that I’d arrived here by accident. But seeing the hope in my eyes, he shook his head slowly.

I was busily trying to process what was happening: thirty minutes before I’d been wandering around the woods not really believing there was any chance of stumbling across the Slipper; now here I was, twenty metres away from it, chatting with the warden as if this was a normal place to bump into someone.

For the next half an hour, I tried my best to persuade him to let me photograph the orchid. I tried everything, desperation creeping into my voice. But no matter what I said, he stuck to his word and remained there, barring the way forward. ‘I’d love to take you up the hill and introduce you, but I really can’t – it’s the worst part of the job.’

How is it that one plant can secure the loyalty of so many people? Why, each summer, does someone spend weeks living out here in the middle of this wood, all alone and miles from civilisation? I wondered how far these people would go, and what they would be willing to do, if confronted by someone trying to steal it. Such is the strength of the hold it has over them that even now, after all the success of the reintroduction programme, they remain unwilling to divulge its secret location.

And standing there, peering through the trees at that fragile, caged plant, I suddenly understood why. Each and every orchidophile involved in keeping the knowledge of the site secret had dedicated their lives to serving this plant. It had become a thing of genuine value, passed down over generations like a family heirloom. To reveal its location would be to welcome in the thieves and the vandals who care more for their own gain than the enjoyment of others. The idea of this delicate flower, nurtured lovingly for more than eighty years, at risk of being plundered after all it’s been through, was a heart-breaking thought. That it must be so highly protected in the first place provoked a genuine sadness in me and, for that moment at least, I understood their reluctance to tell.

Defeated, I said goodbye to the warden and retreated, sneaking one last look at that mythical plant before I left. The warden went the other way, returning to his hut hidden deep beneath the trees.

Having experienced the wilds of the Dales for myself, I remain convinced there are more wild Lady’s Slipper plants to be discovered in that part of north Yorkshire, an area little visited by anyone but the occasional sheep farmer or hardy hiker. The Dales are so wild and remote, and cover such a vast area, that it would be almost impossible to search it all properly.

Could there be more plants out there, just waiting to be discovered? In his 1948 work Wild Flowers in Britain, Robert Gathorne-Hardy tells a story of a Yorkshire mill-girl who went for a walk in the woods and returned with a bunch of forget-me-nots, among which was a single Lady’s Slipper. When questioned, she couldn’t remember where she had picked it. The exhilarating thought that a few wild Slippers are out there, growing undisturbed is captured perfectly by Summerhayes: ‘What orchid enthusiast in Britain has not experienced the thrilling hope of re-discovering the rare Lady’s Slipper in its erstwhile haunts, or even of finding it in a yet unrecorded locality.’